User talk:Tim Donahey/8
=June= Hi Tim Donahey -- we are excited to have Starting Strength Wiki as part of the Wikia community! Starting a new wiki can be overwhelming, but don't worry, the Wikia Community Team is here to help! We have put together a few guides to getting started. They say imitation is the best form of flattery so absolutely check out other wikis on Wikia for ideas on layout, ways to organize your content, etc. We are all one big family at Wikia and the most important thing is to have fun! * Our guide to Getting Started gives you 5 things you can do right now to set your wiki up for success * We also put together some Advice On Starting a Wiki which provides a more a in-depth look at some of the important things you should consider when building a wiki * If you are new to wikis in general than we recommend checking our new user FAQ If you need help (which trust me we ALL do) you can access our full in-depth help at Help Wikia, or email us through our . Also, you can visit our live #wikia chat channel any time. A lot of the veteran "Wikians" hang out here so its a good place if come if you want to get some advice or simply make friends. Now, go edit! We look forward to seeing this project thrive! Best wishes, Catherine Munro 18:29, June 5, 2008 Hi, Tim I'm Shawn, a Helper here at Wikia. I've been looking around your wiki and making a few edits and building up a couple articles. I have to say I'm amazed by what you've accomplished in such a short time here! There's a lot of promise for this to be a great resource (I'd like to use it too, as I do some strength/toning training myself). Since I'm a Helper, I have a lot of staff-level tools at my disposal, so if you need any help at all, let me know on my talk page! Shawn 17:53, 12 June 2008 (UTC) Page formatting Hey Tim, there's an easy way to fix something like moving the information I posted under Weightlifting Programs to Bodybuilding Programs. It's on the Help Wiki here: http://help.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Moving_pages The steps are: # #go to the page you want to move #click the move link at the top of the article #type the new name for the page #choose whether you also want to move the page's talk page (usually you will) #click the "move page" button and the page will be renamed to the new title I just moved it for you, go take a look! Shawn (talk) 21:30, 12 June 2008 (UTC) Tim, as you've found out, recreating pages is really easy. Sorry for the mixup! Shawn (talk) 20:23, 13 June 2008 (UTC) Hi Tim - categories are helpful ways of letting your readers know what 'section' of your wiki they're in. Ideally every article would have a category and you'd make them up yourself. For instance, Athletic Programs could be put into an overall category named "Training Programs", and would be listed with Powerlifting, etc., or however else you want to organize it. The markup goes: Category:Example (in double brackets ( Shawn (talk) 18:26, 16 June 2008 (UTC) A good thing to keep in mind is to make sure that when you create an article, you link to it from another page, otherwise people have a harder time finding it. These end up as Dead-End pages (Special Pages > Dead-End Pages). I've been going through the list and linking them to the main page, but you can go through and reorganize them however you want. Shawn (talk) 19:22, 16 June 2008 (UTC) I see what you mean about the dead-end links, I'll ask about that with some tech people. I'm also going to look into promoting the wiki and seeing if we can bring in some other people to help edit. You've definitely gotten a really good start here by yourself. What do you think of something like a community section, where people can share stories about working with this material? Shawn (talk) 21:43, 16 June 2008 (UTC) Ads Hi Tim -- I saw on the Central forum and on Shawn's talk page that you're not happy with the ads that you're seeing today. It looks like the ad network that we're using today is serving different ads than before, and I can understand why you feel like the ads you're seeing today are inappropriate for this wiki. This is the first morning of the new system, so we're still working out the bugs. We're looking right now at how to change the ad server configuration so that we get higher-quality and more appropriate ads on the site. You should see things change by mid-day today. So don't give up yet, okay? Let me or Shawn know later on today if you're still seeing problem ads. This is definitely a problem that we can fix. -- Danny (talk) 17:10, 17 June 2008 (UTC) I just want to echo this here and say that it'd be a shame to lose the great work you've done so far over a problem that's easily fixed. I'm still here to talk about and help with your wiki, but if I don't get back right away it's because I'm helping out with similar problems over Wikia. Shawn (talk) 20:21, 17 June 2008 (UTC) Categories Tim, the sidebar looks great, and it looks like you've fixed the problem with FAQ not showing up - fantastic! Now all you have to do to get everything organized is continue going through your aticles and assigning a category section for each one with the "Category:Name of category" tag. If you need help with that, I'll be around. Shawn (talk) 18:42, 23 June 2008 (UTC) =July= Welcoming Hi, Tim - you're continuing to do awesome stuff here! I've been really excited to see how much you've been making the wiki grow. One thing you might find helpful for getting more people to continue to edit and become a part of your wiki's community is by welcoming them, and if they're anonymous IPs, to suggest they sign up and log in. I've been doing it a few times, recently, but I thought I'd pass along the tip. All you have to do is leave them a quick note on their talk page saying hi and that you appreciate their edits, and you can create a template for this as well. This makes people feel like they're becoming a part of something, and it makes them want to come back for more. Also, I don't know if you've heard about this yet, but there's discussion about changing the ad format, so that people who log in don't see ads in the articles. I know you've had problems with ads on Wikia before, and this is a good solution. It's going to be a really good selling point to get more people to log in! Shawn (talk) 21:05, 1 July 2008 (UTC) Spotlight Hi, Tim - we've been making some specific spotlight areas just for Sports, which are ways of highlighting and drawing attention to specific wikis in the Wikia community. I remember you telling me you wouldn't have a lot of time coming up to work on the wiki, but whenever you're able to come back and do a bit more, just let me know and we can set that up for you. I do have one suggestion for this - if you break some of your longer articles up into smaller things, with several pages each, it'll increase your page count really easily. That's just my two cents, but I hope you can come back and do some more work soon - you've been doing great stuff! Shawn (talk) 19:02, 21 July 2008 (UTC) Congrats on your 10,000 hits, Tim! You certainly worked hard to get there! One thing to keep in mind is that with your site as established as it is, you'd really only need to put in 30 mins. a day a few times a week to keep it active, answer messages and so forth. Obviously other things come first, but being around and visible, welcoming new users and so forth, goes a long way towards keeping a wiki popular. Shawn (talk) 21:28, 28 July 2008 (UTC) =August= Hey, Tim! Good to see you back online and editing! We still have a Spotlight ready to go for you, but the only thing holding it up is your article count. We like to see more than 25 articles to consider a wiki for Spotlighting, and I've been noticing some of the articles you've got are really long. For instance, if you split up the FAQ into several parts, it'd be great - not only for being able to do the Spotlight, but also for your readers, as going through extra-long articles can get tiresome after a while. Just a tip! Shawn (talk) 19:56, 1 August 2008 (UTC) Tim - welcome back! And congrats on getting your article count up. Your Spotlight has been submitted, and will be showing up on pages across Wikia soon, hopefully bringing in more editors this way from other Sports and Hobbies wikis. Shawn (talk) 17:26, 12 August 2008 (UTC) Tim - you don't need to do anything for your spotlight. I put together an image to the proper specs using your current logo and banner, and it's in the pipeline. You should start seeing it up and around Wikia soon if you haven't already! Shawn (talk) 21:00, 18 August 2008 (UTC) Bodybuilding Wiki Hi, Tim - we got your request to merge with the Bodybuilding Wiki. Since the content of both is so alike, there's not even much of a point to mege them - nobody's going to be looking to it since there's only 12 articles on there anyway. What you can do is go and copy any of the articles there, if you want to use them on yours. If you really think there's going to be a problem with people not finding yours, you can go ahead and do a redirect from the front page of Bodybuilding to your wiki. Shawn (talk) 00:06, 20 August 2008 (UTC) Crap - my bad - as it turns out you can't redirect from that wiki to this one. Shawn (talk) 01:26, 20 August 2008 (UTC) spreadsheet request I would just like to make a request to have the Starting Strength Logbook Calculator available on google docs just like you have for the Warmup Calculator. Thanks edit: Whoops I see it on the downloads page, thanks. I was looking at the Novice Program page which only has the scribd link. 23:40, 20 August 2008 (UTC) Mike Wikia's New Style Hi Tim, I've been working on a new main page layout this morning. Hopefully you have read about the skin and ad changes at Wikia's New Style on Central Wikia. If not, I hope you'll have a look. One of the changes is a block of two ads on each main page. It's possible that they won't always show up, but to ensure your main page continues to work properly when they do, you need to update your main page column formatting code with new column tags I have drafted a main page using the new tags on here which I hope you can take a look at - feel free to edit it of course. The main change to the layout is the fixed width of the right column. This still allows a lot of customisation - for example see these main pages - w:c:muppet, w:c:wowwiki, w:c:ffxi. If you encounter any problems with the new tags, please let me know. Thanks -- Shawn (talk) 22:24, 22 August 2008 (UTC) =October= Hey Tim - just checking in, making sure everything's okay. Good to see you back editing! Shawn (talk) 17:54, 7 October 2008 (UTC) =November= HEY TIM! File:Coachbook5.jpg File:Example.jpg Tim, not real sure how to contact you thru this Wiki, so hopefully you get this message. I'd like to talk to you about my new website--CoachBook--www.coachbook.ning.com. I'd love to see you sign up and post Mark's videos! I met with Charles Staley the past couple of days and we are gonna do some things to make CoachBook blow up! You can email me at billvasko@maxxtraining.com. Thanks! BILL VASKO